Archbishop calls for Christian-Muslim co-operation on global poverty

In an address in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, where he is chairing a major seminar of Christian and Muslim scholars, Dr Williams, insisted poverty was not just a matter of material deprivation or lack of access to power and influence.

It was also, he said: "the modern Western person cut off from the depths of religious and cultural meaning by a series of relentless messages about consumer gratification."

Dr Williams said that, for all their differences, there was a "common agenda" between Christian and Muslims in rejecting "any simply individual idea of the good life."

He added: "Wealth itself has to be redefined to mean access to the resources that make our existence stable and meaningful – so that material abundance created at the expense of such access, at the expense of cultural or family stability, or the presence of the signs of faith in public life, will represent a net move towards poverty."

Dr Williams also rejected claims that religious approaches to the debate on poverty and world trade lacked rigour: "It has to be said clearly and often that the religious objection to aspects of the current global trade regime is not a sentimental aversion to wealth or a sort of commendation of endless large-scale almsgiving. It is rather to do with the ways in which certain practices make it impossible for some nations to be economic agents in any meaningful way."

Dr Williams urged Christians and Muslims "to look out for opportunities for a particular sort of collaboration." These included being "advocates for the visibility of religion."

"We know where the roots of poverty lie – in the refusal to accept the meaning that God gives the world, a refusal which shows itself not only in atheism but also in the anxious and greedy spirit that cannot see the human context of economic activity," he said.